Today I mostly .....

[Zelandeth]

Caddy is back from the garage.

They had a good dig into the front end and aside from the little bit of play in the universal joint at the bottom of the steering column I had already identified it was all deemed good.

The tracking was another matter. It was set up with just over 4mm of toe in. Correct setting is 1mm of toe out...so yes, that would definitely account for the fidgety feeling to it and the shoulder wear on the front tyres.

I've only driven it in absolutely torrential rain on the way back from the garage, but it seems to feel a little more stable. Definitely less squirmy under braking anyway.

Will definitely be getting a new full set of tyres fitted at the earliest opportunity. All four of these have shoulder wear now, plus they have never been the best.

[Zelandeth]

Out in the van today noted that I had lost the nearside front speaker.

From prior experience I knew this was almost certainly going to be down to the spaghetti associated with the stereo getting caught when reinstalling the engine cover as despite a couple of strategically positioned cable ties it still managed to get utterly in the way. Therefore there was roughly a 50% chance of something getting pulled out every time the cover went back in.

The cause of this isn't hard to see. Not helped by the fact that there really isn't much under there to anchor anything to.



This was a classic case of me looking at it and thinking "that will take me half an hour to tidy up" and then proceeding to lose about 80% of an afternoon.



The eventual result of a lot of swearing, dropping things through the floor and poking myself in the ribs on the driver's side seat runners.



If you look even vaguely closely you can see that calling it tidy would be a vast overstatement, but it's a huge amount better than it was and less likely to cause issues down the road.

Most notably that huge chunk of terminal strip has been ousted in favour of a bunch of Wago connectors. I know some people don't like them, but I've never had any problems with them, and nothing is going anywhere here. They're far less likely to vibrate loose than screw terminals, and I definitely didn't have the time to faff about soldering and heat shrinking things together today - as that would be the way to properly do this. If I go back in here one day to reroute the power feed (I'd ideally like the head unit to be powered from the leisure battery so I can run it without worrying about draining the vehicle one when stationary) I will probably go down that road then.





One of the other changes I made was to add a local ground...apparently whoever originally fitted the ISO harness never connected the ground pin! The head unit was grounded entirely through the antenna shield and/or the fitting cage (the dash moulding is actually metal under the vinyl finish). I ran that to a ring terminal I fitted under one of the dash retaining bolts.

The downside of the arrangement is that there is no longer enough slack to allow the head unit to be removed - you need to unplug it from the back first. Though given that is entirely doable with the dash layout in the van and will add about two minutes to the job, if that's the price to pay for getting the wiring out of the way of the engine cover, I'll gladly pay it. That cover comes off far more often than I have the head unit out of the dash.

While I had things in bits anyway I took the opportunity to fix a couple of issues where illumination was concerned. One was that there was no connection to the illumination circuit from the head unit. This meant that it was waaaaaaaaaaay too bright and lit the entire cab up when driving at night, even with the brightness manually turned down. Secondly was that I'd never wired up the illumination when I fitted the compass (read: Put it there to cover the hole in the dash top left when I removed the old alarm volumetric sensor). Thirdly the illumination for the cigarette lighter didn't work.

The first and second points were easy enough to sort. So the head unit now dims to a more sensible level automatically when the lights are turned on, and the compass now glows a night vision friendly deep red colour when the headlights are on.



The camera has of course decided to make it look far brighter than it really is.



Haven't been able to sort the lighting on the cigarette lighter though. Pretty sure it's just a blown bulb but there's no way to get to the back of it to replace it. I can just about touch the housing with the tips of my fingers if I pull the blower switch out - but the illumination bit is on the far side of it so that gains me absolutely nothing. Reckon it's something I would need to literally pull the whole front dash moulding out to get to. That will have to happen one day when I get the scuttle replaced...so it can be replaced with an LED then, until then it will just have to continue bugging my OCD after dark.

It doesn't really *look* like I've done anything here does it?



The only clue from the driver's seat is that the wiring being tidied up means you can no longer see any of it - several wires used to be visible down below the hazard light switch. Not any more.



The difference is very apparent when refitting the engine cover though. It just slots into place now rather than requiring ten minutes of fighting to get it to sit right without snagging the wiring.

I'm pretty sure getting that trapped in the seal was the cause of the clip on the nearside having a broken handle. Someone tried to force it. If anyone knows of a spare one of these clamps sitting around somewhere, please let me know.





My nearside one is missing most of the handle so requires a screwdriver to lever it open/closed which is less than ideal. I have tried to buy them from a couple of breakers over the last couple of years, but they've apparently deemed it to be too low a value a part to be worth replying to me - well aside from the one guy who wanted £60 plus VAT and postage for one...which seemed a little...steep...to me!

[Zelandeth]

It turned out that the tracking on the Caddy was a long way out. The previous garage had set it pointing off to the left and with a little over 4mm of toe in. The book value is 1mm of toe out.

Suffice to say with it set properly the car...van...whatever you would call this vehicle drives massively better. The fidgety feeling to the handling has gone and it tracks absolutely perfectly straight now.

With that sorted it was time to get some decent tyres fitted.

Aside from the shoulder wear, these just weren't great.



They're Kumho Eco-Wings and seem to be a very hard compound. On a dry road they're okay, but on an even vaguely damp road they seem to have about as much grip as industrial grade teflon.

I figured it was time to improve this situation.





Much better.

The Uniroyal Rainexpert range have been my preferred tyre since I started driving 20 years ago, so that's what has gone on. I've just always found them to be good all round tyres for the price.

While they aren't great I figured that someone can probably still get some life out of the tyres that came off so I saved them from getting chucked on the recycling pile.



I've never actually had the wheels of this car before so used this as an opportunity to have a quick look around.

Plenty of life left in the brake pads and no horrors to be seen.



Bit surprised to see vented discs on it to be honest. I will probably be pulling these apart for a clean sooner than later as the pads in one of the front calipers do drag just enough to squeak now and then while driving which is really irritating when it does it.

The rear shocks are a little on the crusty side though.



It's only the shield portion rather than the actual hydraulic portion, so not a huge issue really. In fairness they're probably the original ones, so after 20 years and 105K miles they've done their time. I would really like to try fitting some slightly softer shocks on this thing anyway as I think that would massively improve the ride. It's clearly been set up with a view to having a full cargo load in the back as a van - which is way more weight than this is ever going to see. I'd really rather take comfort over a bit of cargo capacity.

Immediate observations on the road, even though I've only done a few miles: Steering feel...well actually exists now. It really didn't feel like it was connected to the wheels before. Road noise is *massively* improved. Like way more difference than I'd ever expect. It's like driving with windows open/closed at 40mph levels of difference. Ride is still rather on the harsh side, but does feel slightly more compliant. Which with them being a softer compound would make sense.

Will be going out on a decent run tomorrow so be curious to see what my thoughts are after getting a few miles covered. Not making any grip etc observations until after that as there will still be mould release compound on them which will need to be scrubbed off yet.

-- -- --

We have made some progress with the Trevi. Aside from just putting the battery on charge as it had gone flat again.



I was working on a bit of a hunch so grabbed some parts. That hunch was that the ignition system arrangement on this car is near enough identical to that used on the 8v injected version of the classic Saab 900. A cap and rotor for those are cheap, so I ordered a pair...worst case I'd throw them in the stores in the back of the garage as they might be handy in the future. Aside from anything else I'd absolutely not write off the possibility of owning another C900 one day in the future.

They turned up today so time to take a look.



The cap is identical to the one on the car as best I can tell. I've gone over it with my digital caliper and every measurement checks out. So that's useful to know for the future.



That wasn't really the issue though, the problem we had been having was tracking down the correct rotor arm - all the supposedly compatible ones seemed to be too short. The duration of the Saab one was a little longer, but I don't think that would likely actually cause us any issues.



What it did for us however was give us a known dimension for the rotor arm that was meant to work with this cap. The working but badly worn Bosch rotor measured as 25.28mm from the tip to the centre of the contact point. The *longest* of the third party ones had been 24.77mm. The new one today measures 25.41mm - which pretty much tied in with what I expected. My gut feeling was that the original one would have been 1" when new... that's pretty close!



Unfortunately I couldn't just use this one as while the top would fit, the bottom half not so much.



It was a useful experiment though in that it pretty conclusively showed us that the rotor arms we had before were indeed too short.

Short of ordering one of every third party equivilant listed for the Bosch 1234 332 215 rotor arm and seeing if we eventually get one which matches up properly I was really struggling to come up with a useful suggestion.

We have ordered two from sellers in Europe which said they were Bosch parts and indeed had a photograph of a Bosch rotor, and were delivered a third party one...with the same dimensional issues as the first one we bought.

Nowhere we can find in the UK lists an actual Bosch one in stock. Until I stumbled across an eBay seller this afternoon who had two NOS ones on the shelf. Needless to say they have both been ordered.

When they arrive...and they better be actually Bosch ones, and the right size...we will hopefully finally have this car running reasonably well again and it can be sent home at long last.

If it still has a miss with the new correct rotor arm fitted I will probably cry as that will basically mean the hall effect module in the distributor is bad. I've done everything I really can to test that though and it *seems* we have a solid continuous pulse from the king lead now, so fingers crossed it's just us trying to effectively fire through a plug gap that's more than twice the book value that's causing us issues. I hope.

No...hope doesn't quite cover it. Pray is more like it!

[Zelandeth]

A package arrived this afternoon containing these.



Oh oh...No box, just two rotor arms in plastic bags. We've been here before.

Or have we? Upon closer inspection, no they were in fact genuine Bosch parts.



In case people wondered if there really was that much difference between the correct and pattern parts - here's the difference. The centre post contact point is lined up between these, the pattern parts are really that much shorter.



So you're adding the best part of a full millimetre to the plug gap effectively by using that.

The old one has definitely done its time!



Of course by the time I got a new one fitted to the car it was rush hour so I wasn't able to go for a proper test run. I did bumble around the block a bunch of times though more than long enough to get the car properly warmed up.

Usually this was when the issues became most apparent, with an erratic miss at idle. It now seems a good deal smoother.

https://youtu.be/Or4gIEC99pQ

That *seems* a lot better. It's not perfect, still the odd stumble here and there, but it's entirely passable. Especially as I'm pretty certain that the carb needs setting up properly and/or at least being treated to a proper service kit.

The throttle response is definitely miles better.

https://youtu.be/Z3s2suJcVBY

I will need to get out tomorrow afternoon so I can give the car a proper test run. I'm absolutely NOT saying it's fixed now. I've proclaimed the ignition issues sorted twice now, then about half an hour later ended up having on both occasions to push the cursed thing because it had cut out on me and refused to restart because the spark had disappeared again.

IF it behaves itself tomorrow when I take it out for a proper test run, it'll get a (careful) wash to get rid of the large amount of tree that is now adorning it and then be returned to its owner.

With a good spare rotor in the boot too so we won't need to play this game for a good number of years hopefully.



In case you wondered how many rotor arms had been involved - there were no less than five incorrect but supposedly compatible ones picked up before we finally managed to find an actual NOS example of the right part.

Hopefully we can get a line drawn under this episode shortly.

[Zelandeth]

What's the verdict then?



Well, it's back in the drive having got there under it's own power for the second time in a row which is a start!

Had it out for about half an hour during which I basically drove back and forth between the same two roundabouts over and over and over again, being about as heavy footed as I dared given I know the radiator is very much past its prime. No new issues to report, in fact having blown some of the cobwebs (literally in some areas!) out seems to have resulted in it running far smoother.

Still isn't really 100% happy under very light loads, though gets a lot better once fully up to temperature and is far better in that regard than it was. Don't think there's any sense whatsoever in my trying to diagnose that minor gripe any further without us having had somebody who knows their stuff cast their eyes over the carb. My gut feeling is still that the carb is jetted for a 1600 rather than 2000 engine, though that's a very uneducated guess. Equally I know the top gasket is made out of a cereal box, and at least one of the solenoids has been manually wedged open because the coil is open circuit, so the thing could really do with at least having a proper service kit and some new solenoids thrown at it before a real judgement can be made.

So it seems to be running reasonably well now. Do I trust it further than I can throw it? Not in the slightest! I'm pretty convinced by now that this car just doesn't like me and wants to see me suffer.

Will try to get it cleaned up tomorrow to remove all the tree gunk, give it a repeat of today's test and if all still seems to be good will arrange to drop it back with its owner. Before it has the opportunity to throw anything else at me!

Recommendations to the owner will be:

[] Carburettor needs serviced & Solenoids replaced.

[] Carb setup needs investigation - suspect jetting may be incorrect.

[] Replace or recore the radiator.

[] Check ignition timing.

[] Investigate front end exhaust leak.

[Zelandeth]

Not going to be a massive amount of progress to report over the coming week as it's forecast to be a million degrees and I simply cannot function when it's hot. So anything is getting done in about 20 minute bursts before I start fading fast from the heat.

The Caddy has been working very well as dog transport, only real gripe is that the floor in the back is a very hard plasticy material and they slither around a bit. Star in particular doesn't like that so I've been meaning to put something in which will provide a little more friction.

Progress so far.



Should also help bring noise levels down a little which can't be a bad thing.

I had wanted to have a look at the area around where the ramp used to be. I know if you open the driver's window half way it tends to pull a bunch of exhaust fumes into the cab so there must be a fair sized gap somewhere.

Well that won't be helping.



This is the point at which I started looking more closely at the workmanship of the ramp delete...To call it shonky would be something of an understatement.

For a start, this Sikaflex appears to be structural.



Originally that rear section would have been part of a hinged ramp which was attached to a big hinge on the floor. That took up a bunch of space and would basically delete 70% of your rear visibility (and probably weighed about 100kg), so not surprised it was removed.

It would be nice if they had done a better job of it though!

Apart from the Sikaflex, the only thing that seems to be actually connecting the centre section of the bumper, lower door latches etc to the rest of the vehicle are these *quality* welds.



They hadn't even bothered to weld the other side!



Yeeeaaahh... quality workmanship.

The inner and outer panels there are "spot welded" together...in so far as someone has thrown some weld vaguely at the panel...however there's about a 1/8" gap between them and I don't think a single one has actually connected the two bits together.

I think the plan will be to pull the outer section off entirely, remove the currently structural Sikaflex, at which point I think the inner ramp delete panel will basically fall out.

I will then clean up and rust proof everything involved (there's no paint on the outside of the ramp delete bits at all). Then I think I will permanently attach the outer section to the inner off the car. Then I'll offer the whole assembly up, and bolt the whole lot into place using some hugely overkill 90 degree brackets and high tensile bolts and big washers. Then we'll seal up the joins with fresh Sikaflex. That should do a far better job of sealing things up and sort the wobbly bumper issue.

I did wonder about reinstating the ability to drop that section down as it would be nice for the dogs, but the latches and everything are long gone plus the hinges so it would be quite a bit of work, probably more trouble than it's worth.

The whole underside of the dropped floor is quite crispy and really wants going over with a wire brush, some rust converter and some underbody protection. It'll need some repair in that area at some point, especially to the floorpan itself - but the frame is about 1/8" thick box section and it's all just flat panels and right angles so wouldn't be difficult to rebuild if necessary. The actual VW metalwork under there is in good shape, especially by the standards of a 20 year van.

[Zelandeth]

Had the scans for a film from a couple of months ago come back today. This was a bit of a throwaway example as it was very ordinary Velvia 100 which was several years out of date. It hadn't been stored well, being found at the bottom of a box in our loft where it gets hotter than the core of the sun. So wasn't expecting much.

Cue surprise when quite a few decent shots turned up on it. Here are some from a local classic car club meet at the start of May. This was an evening event on an already cloudy day so the lighting was poor. So I was having to shoot these generally wide open, especially as being so far out of date I was treating the film as about ISO 80.



Would have been nice to get a more neutral background for this. May need to try desaturating the background in post processing and see how that looks.



Really happy with this shot though. This was pretty much spot on in every way what I was aiming for.



Hailing from the same corner of the world was this absolutely gorgeous Nash. Which I'm massively irked that I messed up the focus on the main photo of. There were only two photos on the whole film out of focus, this being one of them.



Interior on that was lovely.





Whole car was...the little details on it meant I could probably have used a whole film on the one car.



This one was precisely as painfully orange as this photo makes it look.



I had deliberately dialled the exposure back a little on this as it suited the subject better I thought.





Lovely to see a Mini that's not been "upgraded" into a Cooper replica.



Frustrated with myself on this one...I absolutely should have moved a fraction to the right and totally hidden that car in the background behind the subject. Never occurred to me at the time. Oops.



Another one I wish I had a clean background to, but was very happy with how it came out otherwise. Was seeing quite how far I could push depth of field while still keeping the subject sharp.



Couple of non car related ones. The spectacular sunsets I used to see regularly up north are something I very much miss, though we do get them here occasionally.





Speaking of keeping things sharp, the definition in the next few shots really impressed me.







Definitely shows that you can get some decent images out of that camera and lens. Not bad for a film I nearly didn't bother using!

[Zelandeth]

Oops.



So much for self restraint. Insomnia and eBay are a dangerous combination.

I always keep half an eye out for T1200s going cheaply as they're a big favourite of mine, despite being machines that don't cope with decades of hibernation very well. This one was collection only and obviously quite rough so I had a feeling might go cheap. So I stuck a low bid on and promptly forgot about it for six days until an email arrived telling me I'd won it!

This was for a pair of machines, a T1200 and T1600, which piqued my curiosity as I'd never seen one of them before. Obviously from the same period as the T1200 but clearly a more advanced machine.

Being quite used to the trials and tribulations of Toshibas of this era I didn't even think about applying power straight out. The power supply at the very least will need to have the electrolytic capacitors replaced and the inevitably leaked slime cleaned up. So I immediately started to strip the T1600 down.

The odds I gave it for surviving dropped significantly only a couple of minutes in.



This is the frame the drives attach to, the corrosion there being caused by the suspend-to-RAM battery pack leaking. By some miracle Toshiba in this case had sat the pack in a little plastic tray and had also put a plastic shield on the motherboard underneath it, so this is the only actual damage I can see from it.

You can see the rust flakes at around 4 o'clock in the photo below, though the motherboard itself seems to have avoided the corrosion.



The hard drive sits straight above the corroded area yet aside from a bit of surface rust on the outer casing looks to have escaped. Whether it still works is another matter. I thought I'd seen all of the different proprietary drives Toshiba had used by now, but no... here's yet another one.





I believe this to essentially be a 40Mb version of the 20Mb drive used in the T1200, using the same I/O connector.



The model numbers are very similar and the early T1600s apparently had a 20Mb drive, which I'd put money on being the same one as used in the T1200. So if this drive is dead I can probably still get it going with one of the spares I have for them. Only choice I'd have really given finding a replacement is likely to be near impossible, and the proprietary interface means solid state solutions aren't really an option. You can't even use a Gotek or similar for the floppy drive as those are also non-standard. This is the connector they use (the black one below), which carries both data and power.



At least they did use this all the way to the mid 90s so I have a few spares of those. The one in the T1600 is a high density drive too, the T1200 being double density only is occasionally annoying.

With that lot extracted I could wriggle the power supply board out.



Quite similar to the one in the T1200 just laid out a bit differently.

Closer inspection revealed the entirely expected incontinent capacitors. The goop was literally dripping off the power transistors in the foreground.



I can't see any eaten traces though so hopefully we've caught it early enough.

This is basically standard on these things nowadays and is why it's so important to not power them up. On the T1200 it is quite common for the resulting fault condition to stuff unregulated 12V down the 5V rail, usually nuking the motherboard.

Speaking of the motherboard, the CPU isn't attached to it. The CPU and memory both reside on a little daughter board crammed in under the keyboard.



Which being an 80C286 does support the belief this is the big brother of the T1600.

The whole machine was absolutely filthy so in addition to the innards which needed to be cleaned of capacitor slime, everything was removed from the case so it could get the same treatment.



Everything was left out in the sun to dry this afternoon after blowing things dry with the air line. Ignore the heat gun in the photo below, it's just waiting to be ferried to the garage.



The difference is pretty clear to see! These two were identically grubby when we started out.





The keyboard will be getting the same treatment tomorrow having been passed by today as I couldn't find the keycap puller (it's since turned up). This layout was carried over to the T3100SX in 1993, possibly longer.



I will need to get some capacitors ordered up before we can go much further, but I should be able to build most of it back up tomorrow before I have the chance to lose too many screws and forget what order too many bits go together in. I know getting the one flex connector back into place is going to be an absolute pig as fishing it out was a real logic puzzle.

Must have been a real beast of a portable in 1989. 12MHz 80C86, 1Mb (standard) memory, 40Mb HDD, 1.44Mb floppy, full EGA graphics (onboard monitor is grey scale), optional inbuilt modem, 50 mins or so per battery (2x slots, hot-swappable), and a weight of around 5kg - with a much better handle than the T1200. The footprint is barely any bigger though which surprises me. This really couldn't have been made any smaller.

Speaking of dates, based on the codes on things it looks like mine dates from the first few weeks on 1990.

I'll probably pull the T1200 apart tomorrow for assessment and cleaning. Though given the *externally* visible corrosion I don't hold out great hopes for it.



I've found these are usually worse inside than out, so am expecting this to be pretty bad. At the very least it should yield come useful parts though.

Hopefully I'm just being a pessimist...watch this space I guess!

[Zelandeth]

The Caddy continues to surprise me and make me realise what a cracking little motor it is.

Today I drove from our house in Milton Keynes up to a friend's place just outside Ellon, Aberdeenshire.

Of course this was a journey I chose to do when the northbound M6 was closed at Carlisle.

A journey I can basically do on autopilot and should take eight hours plus change wound up taking twelve hours twenty-nine minutes. Blarg.

Nevertheless, I got out at this end of the journey not feeling at all frazzled. Despite the last two hours being straight into the sunset then along tiny country lanes in the dark with no road markings. Tired, obviously. However I'm not a bundle of nerves, I'm not sure anywhere aside from my fingers cramping a bit from holding the steering wheel but I get that in any car after a couple of hours. It really is far better a long distance mile muncher than it has any right to be. As an added bonus it looks like we managed to see 54MPG on the run.

[Zelandeth]

Some cars can really surprise you. For instance I fully expected my Xantia Activa to be a fantastic motorway mile muncher...it's a luxury car with big cushy seats and plenty of power.

You wouldn't really expect much in that regard though from the Caddy. Over the weekend she's covered a little over 1000 miles on the motorway plus quite a bit of local running around. Including a run up to my traditional photo spot.





I still reckon that for a car derived van that the Caddy isn't a bad looking little thing. The proportions just seem to work.

She does need a wash now though...I seem to have brought back half the insect life in the country with me. This was clean before I set out on Friday.





The little van didn't miss a beat at any point over the whole trip, even despite me having the return run being done in temperatures hitting 38C, and having "a little bit" of cargo on board on the way home.



The economy over the whole weekend looks to have been pretty much 50MPG on the nose. Absolutely no oil or coolant used.

I really am staggered how comfortable this little van is on long runs like this. If we could get cruise control fitted that would really up the game. I was very much wishing for working AC on Monday though and despite applying sunscreen I have ended up with rather a significant case of trucker's elbow.



So what was I doing messing around doing a 1000 plus change trip on a ridiculously warm few days anyway?

Well you all know I've got a serious problem where old computing equipment is concerned. Sadly a friend has been working on clearing a family member's estate. Quite a lot of old tech was among that which I am very grateful for them offering to send my way as it has given me the opportunity to tick off a couple of wish list items.

The first of which was this. The main reason really for making the trip.



In there we have an Apple ][ Plus, a bitsa badged as a Europlus, and a matching Kaga branded green screen monitor.

I've been after one of these machines for a long while now for obvious reasons as someone with an interest in computing history, but have always baulked at the prices they usually command on the open market.

The top machine looks to be in really good shape and it certainly worked fine about 20 years ago, so hopefully once I've gone through and replaced a few capacitors in the power supply we'll have it up and running again.

The second machine is one that was built over a period of time from spare parts, though we don't know for certain it's condition beyond missing a keyboard. I do have two keyboards though so that isn't a huge issue. Hopefully I can get it going, but if not it should be a good source of spares for the other one at the very least.

Along with the machines themselves there was also a small mountain of floppy drives and probably a couple of hundred discs.



Two of the Apple drives definitely more or less worked when we last had the machine out, though I'm planning on them all needed a good going over and at the very least a good clean.

In the garage I knew there was a small stack of PCs waiting too.



In that stack there lies...

[] Compaq DeskPro 386S.
[] Compaq DeskPro 5100.
[] Packard Bell Club 40.
[] Dell Dimension 4000 and matching monitor.
[] Seikosha SL-90 printer.
[] Commodore MPS1230 printer (intended for use with a C64 as I understand it).

However this wasn't by any means the end of it as you can probably guess from the amount of kit that was crammed in the back of the Caddy. Here's what else ended up coming south with me.

[] Acorn Electron and the expansion unit. Both in box showing very little signs of ever being used.





That's quite nice to have given I've been a long term Acorn fan.

[] Atari 800XL.



I'd never even seen one of these up until a few days ago, will be nice to have lined up next to the ST.

[] Amstrad CPC464.





Again this shows very little sign of use...still had the introductory tape in the drive.



[] Brother Pro-Lectric 6213 electric typewriter.



[] Adler Tippa manual typewriter.



[] Ansafone Model 6A answering machine from the late 60s/early 70s.



[] A pair of portable B&W televisions.



[] Ferguson B&W TV.



[] Fidelity HF42 portable record player. Very cheap and nasty!



[] Samsung A10 laptop.



This thing is a bit painful to use being based on a single core AMD Duron. Might prove useful for automotive diagnostic software though.

[] An Ecko portable record player which I've kept forgetting to photograph.

Most things other than the older computers will be moved on, but much better I spend a bit of time to find them homes rather than winding up in the e-waste skip.

Should keep me out of trouble for a while! Hopefully start digging into the Apple kit at the weekend.

The plethora of computer gear though will definitely come in handy next year if I wind up running the retro computer and technology panel at Scotiacon. Fills in a couple of big gaps. A Sinclair QL, Vic-20, Commodore PET and a BBC Master probably make up the last couple of things on my wish list.

[Zelandeth]

It's going to be a little while before I get to testing the Apples. Before they go near mains the power supplies will need the Rifa filter capacitors replacing and the output voltages checked.

Nothing to say I can't take a look at some of the supporting hardware though. First up I decided it was the turn of the monitor.

CRT monitors from this sort of era I have always found to be pretty bulletproof unless they've been massively abused. They just soldier on and on until the tube eventually wears out.

I did a couple of sanity checks, and after replacing the missing fuse in the mains plug we were up and running, the BBC standing in as a video source.



Not the best for getting an overall impression of the image quality though...so I grabbed the next machine which had a composite video output (Toshiba T1200) and hooked it up. I've always associated monochrome monitors like this with text only systems, so it appealed to my sense of technological oddity to see a GUI running on it.





Shame the camera doesn't capture the colour very well. It's quite pleasing to the eye even if I do personally prefer amber to green - though I suspect that's just as I've spent many hundreds of hours in front of plasma displays so black and orange is something my brain is just used to and feels natural.

While the size needs a tweak, the geometry is decent. The CRT is a little tired it looks like as it's pretty dim, entirely usable though. Wouldn't be the first time I've seen one improve a bit after a few hours of use either following a long period of hibernation.



DOS programs look a little less odd.





This photo shows something (albeit a bit hard to see in the photo) I hadn't realised before. The composite output on this machine obviously supports colour (or at least grey scale) as the bars in the graphs are different shades. I thought it was monochrome only like the internal LCD. I'll need to hook it up to a colour display to find out.

While I can't do all that much about the brightness, I figured I could see if the focus would respond to adjustment. It doesn't matter how long I've been working on things like this, but carrying out adjustments on a live CRT monitor always feels like a very precarious operation. I'm always acutely aware of the fact you're only a muscle twitch or sudden sneeze from extreme pain!



Thankfully the focus control on this isn't buried right in among the EHT circuitry as on several I've worked on, instead it's nice and easy to get to. It's the little white doodad on the lower left corner of the PCB you can see in the above photo. It definitely did help things, photo doesn't do the difference justice but hopefully you can see it.



Before putting the monitor back together it seemed a good opportunity to do some cleaning. Firstly was just to blow any loose fluff and dust out, second was to clean up the back of the CRT around the EHT anode connection. I hadn't been aware of any issues with tracking on this, but figured it was good insurance against it if the area was clean.



Speaking of cleaning the case needed some attention too. It was rather grubby.



I could have spent ages manually scrubbing that down, but I'm far too lazy when I have mechanised assistance available.



Much better.





There are quite a few marks that will never come off but it's a thousand times better. Sadly the front bezel will have to be done by hand as I don't want to risk damaging the maker's badge...so I suspect an hour or so of scrubbing with a toothbrush is in my future.

While I had the "parts cleaner" running I also stuck in the key caps from one of the spare Apple keyboards and the ones from the Toshiba T3200 which I pulled for cleaning a week or two back. I've long since decided that I don't have time or patience to manually scrub each individual key cap... especially when this does a better job anyway.





To give an idea of quite how much digital archaeology I have in my future, this box is full all the way down of 3.5" discs and they all have stuff on them.



There's also about 1/4 that amount again we decanted into another box as it was simply getting too heavy to manhandle. There's probably a couple of hundred of 5.25" ones in the box with the Apple ][ drives as well. It's going to take a while to archive everything from those.

There is another decent bit of news on the vintage technology front too, it looks like a Sinclair QL has been sourced.

Something I'll need to start thinking about sooner than later will be making sure that I have enough displays and display adapters for all of the involved machines for the hands on event they'll hopefully be used for next year. In a similar vein I need to get the power supplies in several of the Toshibas recapped as several are showing signs of issues. I really want to do everything I can to ensure things are as reliable as possible, last thing I want is machines disgracing themselves while they're being demonstrated.

[Zelandeth]

TPA has been out and about again today doing normal car things.



I do need to try to figure out why she occasionally has issues at idle/on light throttle after running for a while. It feels like fuelling, though I don't think it's delivery. Guess I probably ought to actually check the float height in the carb given I have to confess to having not touched that so far.

The van will be going in sometime over the next couple of days to get a full set of new tyres on to deal with the horrible perishing going on with the current set.



Given how much weight sits on the back axle of this thing I'm not inclined to take any chances whatsoever.

[Zelandeth]

While there was still no visible wear on the tyres on the van, the rear ones in particular were starting to perish quite badly.



Given the amount of weight particularly on the rear axle of this thing I'm not willing to take chances.

Quite how the rears didn't get an advisory on the MOT a couple of weeks ago I've no idea. There was significant perishing visible around the whole tyre between the tread bands as well as what you can see in that photo.

So the second trip to The Garage over by Wolverton in a month (the Caddy had a full new set just prior to a run up to Aberdeen a couple of weeks ago) was arranged.

The situation has now been greatly improved.



Funky sidewall design.

How they age and wear we'll see as the months pass I guess.

I really wasn't expecting to feel the slightest difference from the driver's seat given that the Mercedes T1/TN really isn't the last word in driving dynamics, though you really can. Most notable is that it is much more stable in the straight ahead position and the steering response is far sharper. I realise that using that word where there's something like three and a half turns lock to lock is a little ridiculous, but you get the idea.

I found a deserted road in an industrial estate and did a couple of test emergency stops from 30mph and can definitely say they bite a hell of a lot better than the old ones in that situation which is definitely a plus.

Guess next up on the tyre roster will the the Cavalier when it arrives. The tyres on that date from 2007 so definitely will be needing replacement before it goes anywhere near the road. Though little details like you know...having any brakes whatsoever might be up first.

[Zelandeth]

Over the last couple of days I got around to photographing all of the computer hardware I picked up a couple of weeks ago.

Main reason for the trip really was the Apple ][



The Acorn Electron was another one I was really happy to bring home having been a fan of Acorn hardware for years. This is boxed and honestly looks like it's never been used.



An Amstrad CPC-464 is nice to have rounding out the home computing lineup given I've already got Sinclair, Acorn, Apple and Commodore from this sort of era represented. This also looks to have next to no use. The protective film is still on the panel above the keyboard.



I will need to find either an Amstrad monitor or a plug in RF modulator for this though. Sure we can sort that out though.

The appearance of an Atari 800XL was a real surprise, I'd never even seen one of these in person before this was dug out of the cupboard it was stored in.



Classy looking thing with the black and silver colour scheme.

Also representing Atari is a very sad looking 2600 VCS.



We reckon this may have been a kerbside find at some point, so may be beyond help. Obviously I'll do my best to save it. One of my housemates is very into their retro gaming so it would be really nice to re-gift this to them if I could get it going.

Tying in with my fondness for Toshiba's early portable machines is this little T1850C.



This is a very compact little unit, though sadly does have a smashed display panel so will likely just be safely stashed away unless I come across another machine with a good display.

Finally was a trio of desktop PCs.



These are two Compaq DeskPro machines, a 386 and P100, and a 300MHz Cyrix based Packard Bell.

The 386 Compaq is the one I am most interested in here as it has the potential to be quite a useful machine for me given the number of older machines I work with. Should be easy enough to get this on the network and a good base for writing disk images to both 3.5" and 5.25" discs for various other machines. My main PC only has access to a USB floppy drive, and you can't write certain images using that because of how the interface works.

-- -- --

After far too long a wait I was finally able to get the time to properly look at the Apple II today. I knew I'd want to get a few hours without interruption to work on it so I'd waited until I had a decent chunk of time. So finally hauled it upstairs today. Hauled is maybe an overstatement as the Apple II isn't actually as heavy as I thought. They still feel substantial, but I was expecting IBM 5150 sorts of heft rather than being quite easy to move.

For folks who know their Apple gear, here's the vital information.



Which I'm taking to mean that this is a 48K machine.

Also on the subject of codes, it looks like we have a mid 1982 date code.



Which if I remember rightly given the Apple IIe replaced the Plus etc in early 1983 is quite a late one.

Unsurprisingly someone has definitely been in here before me, two of the retaining screws for the power supply are missing.



Given the original owner was quite technically minded this wasn't a big surprise.

Yep...plenty of screws missing from the power supply case too.



No nasty surprises in here though. Or Rifa filter capacitors which was a bit of a surprise. I'm sure the last one of these I looked at had a couple in.



Some funky looking really tall electrolytic caps though. Don't think I've seen ones quite this tall and skinny before.



A very quick test showed sensible voltages on the output. I didn't want to run it for more than a second or two without a load connected as I know some switching supplies from this era can't safely run with no load. I just wanted to make sure we didn't have 12V on the 5V rail or anything like that. Only thing left to do was test it in the machine. Well, after I'd checked there were no dead shorts present on that too.

We have life!



Seeing an incandescent lamp used as a power indicator on something as high tech as a computer amuses me somewhat. I do have to wonder if there was some technological reason for the choice (a very cheap crude VDR?) or if it was just cheap. It looks really striking either way.

In addition to the power light there was also a beep and life on screen.



We did have life, however no cursor and the machine refused to respond to keyboard input. I did have a vague memory of these machines refusing to boot without a disc drive hooked up, so pulled the interface card and tried again.



Excellent. That got us a cursor and working BASIC interpreter.



Without a disc drive though there was a limit to what I could do, so this was our next target.



This was just plucked completely at random out of the box of drives. I know these are pretty reliable old bricks, but it seemed prudent to at least do a quick visual check of the internal condition. Removing the case just requires four screws to come out.



Two further screws once removed allows the analogue card to swing back giving you access to the drive mechanism.



The little metal shield over the head just unclips allowing easy access to clean the read write head and pressure pad - these are single sided drives so there's only one head. Which in this case was quite clean even before I gave it any attention.



The first disc I grabbed turned out to have Apple Writer on it, which the machine happily booted into.



I was able to correctly load and view a file - which I'm not showing here as it contains personal information from the original owner.

After ten minutes or so we did seem to start having issues. Initially running the catalog command (the equivilant of "dir" on an MS-DOS or similar system) would result in a proper listing of the disc contents. Like so.



After ten minutes or so however the machine seems to lose its marbles regarding disc I/O. It will start to list the disc contents before starting to print out nonsense and the head actuator in the drive repeatedly slamming against the stops.



Resetting the machine it will try to read from the drive for a couple of seconds just locking up.

The power supply voltages still look to be spot on, so I don't think we have any voltage droop problems. I should get the scope out though to confirm we don't have ripple on there as there could be output stage cap issues.

It's something heat related it seems as if you leave the machine for a couple of minutes it will then work perfectly again for about ten minutes.

No ICs appear to be getting any warmer than I would expect, and the behaviour seems to be identical using either of the two disc interface cards I have. So I might need to do some more digging to get to the bottom of that. I'm sure given the following these machines have most of the common faults are well documented.

I need to do some further research anyway as it's so long since I've used these that I can't for the life of me remember any commands beyond "catalog" to be honest. Basically I need to read the manual! Helpfully I do have quite a bit of the original documentation so the information I need is likely in there.

Having a dig through some of the disc boxes though I did find a rather nice surprise I wasn't expecting. You may remember I found some of the original software documentation when I was packing things up for transportation. Today I found these in one of the disc boxes.



There's about ten discs in that box, with DOS system, master, a print manager and the Pascal series of discs. Aside from the labels on a couple looking a little aged they all seem to be in good order. So far I've had no disc read error issues, a couple of random discs have showed a bit of mould, but I'd say 1 out of 10 out of what I've looked at in terms of the ones which were loose or in cardboard boxes. All the ones in plastic boxes have been fine so far.

Found a couple of other bits of software, including a graphing program.





There was also an expansion card in there which will potentially be useful going forward.



That's a serial card. Not sure, but I think this *may* open up options for communicating with other machines, which could be well be a real bonus when archiving all of these discs.

I did a little testing and we seem to have three working disc drives. Two of the Apple ones and the Cumana one (which sounds like hell, so probably wants a good clean and grease as it sounds like it uses a leadscrew head actuator). The other two Apple and the Super 5 drives run the spindle motor but don't seem to make any effort to seek. That's something we can work on going forward.



A pretty solid starting point I reckon. Machines being stored in good conditions can be a real help!

If folks have any suggestions for the misbehaviour after running for a few minutes I'm all ears.

Getting hold of some actual diagnostic software would probably be really helpful - though how to create the media is then a headache as I think both of the 5.25" drives on other machines are 1.2Mb ones so reliably creating a 100K disc may prove problematic.

Ah, the joys of dealing with stuff this old!

[Zelandeth]

I am slowly getting buried under computers here...another two were picked up yesterday. One of which was a surprise.



The first of the line of Toshiba's portables in what we'd recognise as a modern laptop format.

While it has the same footprint as the T1200 from a couple of years later, it's a lot thinner.



Screen size is about the same, and I *believe* the display resolution is the same - the T1000 lacks the backlight of the T1200 though.



Specs are very like the original IBM PC-Portable. It's based around a 4.77MHz 80C88 (a low power, CMOS based variant of the 8088) and 512K of memory. Does have more standard ports than the IBM though. It does only have a single floppy drive though, rather than the IBM's pair. Toshiba came up with a clever solution to that though by incorporating MS-DOS into ROM, which makes the single drive far less of a headache in the real world.

The T1100 added the option of a second floppy drive, which on the T1200 could also be swapped for a 20Mb hard drive.

Will be interesting to see if we can get it up and going as it would be really nice to have along with the T1200 and the big grey luggable plasma screen brutes that ran into the early 90s.

The T1200 and 1600 both suffer badly from electrolytic capacitor leakage which can easily write them off...I've never had the cover off a T1000 so we'll have to see. I can't see any external signs of corrosion around the power supply socket and around the I/O panel as you often can on T1200s, so we'll see. It will be coming apart completely shortly either way as it needs a deep clean.



This would originally have had an internal NiCd battery pack too, though judging from the weight that has thankfully already been removed from this one so hopefully that at least hasn't nuked anything. Watch this space.


I didn't know that little Toshiba was waiting for me, it was simply a nice surprise. What I had actually gone to meet up with someone to collect though was this.



Finally got me a Sinclair QL.

Even in its current grubby state it's quite a striking looking thing. I had to get the photo backdrop out for this as it was otherwise basically invisible on my black desk mat.

Big black slab of a thing, has a very purposeful sort of industrial design to it. Must have looked really quite futuristic back in 1984.



If memory serves the serial and controller ports were changed to more conventional D-sub connectors rather than the oddball RJ-45 connectors they originally used, so this isn't a later machine.



A close up of the somewhat infamous microdrives that Sinclair eschewed floppy drives for.



You have to wonder if this machine would have done any better if they had gone with a more conventional floppy drive.

In contrast to the ZX81 and Spectrum which are very lightweight (and indeed that was claimed as a selling point), the QL has quite a heft to it and feels quite solid.

Definitely needs a good clean. This case design has plenty of features which like to gather grime.



Likewise the keyboard will need to come apart as the sculpted key caps are filthy and would be a bit of a faff to clean by hand.





This will look a lot better once it's clean.

The keyboard is...well...meh. Compared to the Spectrum it's absolutely brilliant. It's entirely usable and once you've got used to the slightly oddly sculpted keycaps I reckon it would do an absolutely fine job of being "an keyboard." It's not going to win any awards though.

This machine had been reported as basically working but with no keyboard response, likely due to the membrane failing (they basically all do that, and replacements are available). So first thing was to look in to that.



Yep...that would explain why the keyboard isn't working! The membrane cables have decayed to the point they have snapped clear off the headers. We'll need a new membrane.

Some quality cable termination for the case LEDs...just jammed into a pin header.



Let's face it, it wouldn't be a Sinclair product if there wasn't at least some degree of shonkiness in there would it?

Which basically sums up the whole de-cased microdrives plonked right next to each other (and I note, right next to the RF modulator...that doesn't seem ideal) without any shielding whatsoever around the heads.



Before I can go any further I'll need to wait for the keyboard membrane to arrive and will also need to figure out a power supply solution. The socket for power on the QL is an odd three pin setup.



However the connector isn't half as strange as the supply it expects. This takes an unregulated 9V DC supply on one pin, and 15VAC on the other, with a common ground. That's regulated and derived locally on the board into 5V, 12V and -12V where it's needed. I reckon I may well go down the road of a regulated external supply of those rails as it's going to be far less awkward to engineer.

Aside from a good clean though this will be taking its position in the queue until parts arrive.

Car-wise I've had little to report as there's not been much going on *to* report. TPA being out for today's errands has been about as exciting as it's been this week.